Policy lessons don’t travel on their own - a lot goes into helping them from their place of origin to new homes (or stopping them from getting there). Drawing on research with disaster management personnel in Queensland, Dr Jenny van der Arend (@JennyvdA) and A/Prof Alastair Stark distil a ‘traveller’s guide’ of practical insights for policymakers who want to help lessons from place to place. The post is based on their new article in the Journal of European Public Policy and is free to read until October 2023.
Read MoreIn today's post, Dr Raelene West (@raelene_west) discusses the history and current state of Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme. She argues that the NDIS is at a critical juncture, and that its success hinges on people with disability having a more significant role in its design and delivery. Dr West is a sociologist based at the Melbourne Disability Institute at the University of Melbourne, and she has lived experience of disability.
Read MoreYoung people with lived experience of self-harm or suicidal behaviour should be at the forefront of designing, evaluating and implementing suicide prevention research.
Controversial? Unfeasible? Risky?
You name it. As a suicide prevention researcher I have heard it all…by funders, ethics committees, Higher Education Health and Safety committees to name a few.
In this blog, I (Dr Maria Michail) share my experience of working in partnership with young people with lived experience of self-harm and suicidal behaviour to co-design of a guide titled “Visiting your General Practitioner: A guide for young people with lived experience of self-harm and suicidality”.
Read MoreScholars have, for decades, suggested that organisational amnesia can negatively impact the effectiveness of government agencies. So why do they forget? Maria Katsonis has summarised the findings of Alastair Stark (University of Queensland) for why public institutions may be unable - or unwilling - to access and/or use past experiences to help deliver better public outcomes.
Read MoreGrattan Institute’s Stephen Duckett and Matt Cowgill unpack a glaring gap in Australia’s public health system: universal access to dental care.
Read MorePublic funding of private schools has been a contentious issue in Australia. While those in favour of private schools receiving government funding sometimes claim that students studying in private institutions receive better education outcomes, analysis from Southern Cross University‘s David Zyngier and Monash University’s Pennie White seems to disagree.
Read MoreUN Gender Training is a policy that aims to reduce harmful behaviours in peacekeepers and unintended negative effects of peacekeeping missions; but does this well-intentioned, academically based, and centrally designed policy actually work in real life? In this article, Lisa Carson of UNSW Canberra's Public Service Research Group discusses the need for openness and knowledge transfer to strengthen policy design and implementation.
Read MoreLast week marked the launch of the new Public Service Research Group (PSRG) at UNSW Canberra. PSRG has been established to partner with organisational clients to produce new insights into effective public service implementation and evaluation. Stephen Easton was at the launch and reports below. This post originally appeared on The Mandarin.
From the online portal to enrolment targets to workforce shortages, the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme has been plagued with difficulties. But A/Prof Helen Dickinson (@DrHDickinson) cautions that we don't yet have enough information to make definitive statements about success and failure. We should expect some challenges to arise as the NDIS is implemented, and this doesn’t mean that the idea is fundamentally flawed.
Read MoreWhat's a program? What's program management? Differences in how we use these words matter, argues UNSW Canberra's Dr Raymond Young - and the project management discipline needs to adapt its language use if it wants to help government deliver better results.
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